Summer 2012 I Vol. 46, No. 4

Newsletter of the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

ONLINEwww.aejmchistory.org

INSIDE THIS ISSUEAMONG THE MEDIA

When cultural and critical studies emerged as a critique of positivist social science, one of the main criticisms of social science was its ahistorical character. Social science built theories that purported to speak to all times and all places, all while being quite oblivious to its own cultural and historical location. Social science, the critique went, had a status quo bias. Granted, social science, particularly given its embrace of post-positivism, was not as arrogant as the critique often suggested. Nevertheless, we might now be reaching a

point where a wide range of theorists in journalism and mass communica-tion – including social scientists – see the need to better historicize our theories. This creates an enormous opportunity for journalism and mass communication histo-rians to better connect with other theorists in our own discipline.

Research submissions jump for centennial

The History Division saw a jump in submissions during AEJMC’s centennial year. There were 83 papers entered in the research competition, up from 64 last year. Of those submissions, 42 will be presented in Chicago. The 50.6 per-cent acceptance rate is the average across divisions. For complete coverage of the 2012 AEJMC conference, see pages 7-12.

NOTES FROM THE CHAIR

Historicizing theory TimVos

ChairUniv. of Missouri

See VOS I Page 3

Photos, recap of Southeast Colloquium I PAGE 5

Call for papers I PAGE 8

Hartshorn is winner I PAGE 9

Forde is winner I PAGE 4

JJCHC I PAGE 4

Southeast Colloquium I PAGE 5

Teaching Column I PAGE 16

Sound Business I PAGE 13

JJCHC I PAGE 2

19th Century Press

Book Award

Covert Award

AEJMC Chicago I PAGE 10-12History program

King honored for work

Teen scholar

Tips for large classes

Book excerpt

Joint conference record

2 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

By ELLIOT KINGLOYOLA UNIVERSITY (MARYLAND)

The Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, a joint venture of the AEJMC History Division and the American Journalism Historians Association, set an attendance record at its meeting held on March 10 at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Under the able leadership of Kevin Lerner of Marist College and Lisa Burns of Quinnipiac University, nearly 100 participants could attend 16 sessions.

The luncheon keynote address was delivered by Blanche Wiesen Cook, distinguished professor of history at John Jay, who is best known for her prize-winning biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, in which she suggested that Roosevelt had an affair with reporter Lorena Hickok. Cook, who also wrote The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare, offered a spirited call for journalists and academics to be on the forefront of efforts to preserve and defend the freedom of information. She drew a direct line from her work on Eisenhower to WikiLeaks and pointed out how the contemporary press was often hostile to Julian Assange and tepid at best in its support of freedom of information.

In addition to the keynote address, which many in the audience found motivational, attendees could hear research on topics ranging from the antebellum press to science and

science fiction in the late 20th century press. There were panels about race, international journalism, television and radio history, free speech and activism, and advertising and public relations. Research into all aspects of journalism and communications history is welcome at the conference, a situation that accounts for the diversity of presentations. Scholars from different academic disciplines, including journalism and mass communication, history, English, and American studies, and from different stages of their academic careers, from graduate students to senior faculty, participate in the conference.

This year, many people were actively Tweeting throughout the conference,

reaching out to their network of contacts. Moreover, a team of students from St. John Fisher College near Rochester, under the leadership of Todd Soldano, videotaped many of the sessions.

The conference was organized through the Media History Exchange, a social network and archive sponsored by the History Division and the National Endowment of the Humanities. Many of the papers presented are posted on the MHX as is the conference program. To join the MHX, which is a private community, go to www.mediahistoryexchange.org and request an invitation to join. Next year’s conference is planned to be on the second Saturday in March at a site to be determined in Manhattan. n

Joint conference draws record crowd2012 JOINT JOURNALISM AND COMMUNICATION HISTORY CONFERENCE

LISA BURNS I QUINNIPIAC

Keynote speaker Blanche Wiesen Cook talks about the importance of freedom of information for historians at the JJCHC conference in New York in March.

Use of Twitter to discuss sessions, video of panels incorporates technology into annual meeting

3 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

Take gatekeeping theory – one of the oldest theories in our field, and something I’ve written a bit about myself. An AE-JMC listserv debated this spring whether gatekeeping as a media function is now dead—or at least in its death throes. One of the rarely stated assumptions of gate-keeping had been the presence of monop-oly media. It mattered what a newspaper or TV news station produced because readers and viewers had a finite number of options to get the news. But an explosion of media outlets means that a story that is ignored by one news outlet can eventually make it into the marketplace of ideas via a blog or Twitter feed or something else. The monopolies seem to be crumbling.

Leaving social science aside for a mo-ment, much of our normative theory and media ethics have been built on similar as-sumptions about monopoly media. Since it was taken for granted that we lived with monopoly media, those media were assigned various normative tasks or ethical duties. Objectivity, at least in part, was an ethical imperative given the predominance of monopoly media. Jane Singer at the University of Iowa has already been writ-ing about the need to revisit media ethics on a theoretical level given the shifting media environment. I suspect more schol-ars will follow her lead.

Now that we see media’s monopoly status is a variable, rather than a constant, past empirical research bears revisiting. However, too much of the research on blogs and Twitter seems to treat these platforms as the new normal. In other words, the ahistorical impulse lives on, even in the midst of seemingly rapid changes. While the point of much of this research has been to claim that things have changed, this point captures only part of the truth. It’s not simply that things have changed but that things are changing.

Once journalism and mass commu-nication theorists embrace the irony that change is here to stay, it opens up new

paths to partnership with media histo-rians. However, historians will have to embrace that they are in the business of studying change, not just in the business of studying the past. For example, a good many of us have studied how objectivity emerged as an occupational practice and norm in the twentieth century. Hence, we know something about how the cultural

capital of the journalistic field has shifted. This is knowledge we can exploit to explain how journalism’s cultural capital is shifting in the present (and will inevitably keep shifting).

For example, many observers have made the argument that transparency is sup-planting objectivity as a norm and practice. Theorists – historians or social scientists – are not likely to be content with simply describing the change. The task would be to explain what is driving the change; who are the adopters of transparency and who are those who cling to objectivity? Take just one factor from Michael Schudson’s story of objectivity’s eventual emergence: how literary realism created an environment for some of the conventions of objectivity to take root. Are there new literary conven-tions today that might provide fertile soil for transparency?

We might conclude that new conven-tions are indeed taking hold, that a culture of diary reading and writing has taken hold on a mass scale via Facebook, Twit-ter, and blogs. We might also conclude that the habits of self-exposure on social

media plausibly alter the expectations of readers and writers about personal openness in general. Given that openness is an intrinsic dimension of journalistic transparency, we might have a plausible theoretical linkage that could be examined in an empirical study. For example, the hypothesis might be “the more journal-ists read and write on blogs, Facebook,

and other social media, the more they will embrace transparency as a journalistic norm or practice.” This isn’t the strongest idea for a study, given the simplicity of the example; but the idea does illustrate how journalism and mass communication history can inform the study of change in the present.

Perhaps the bigger benefit of studying how change happens is the potential for addressing the second part of the critique of social science – the status quo bias. There is emancipatory potential that comes with learning how change happens. We’ve stud-ied how persons were subjected to change in the past. Perhaps we can put that knowledge to use by empowering persons to be agents of change in the present.

Sources cited: Singer, J. B. (2010). Norms and the network: Journalistic eth-ics in a shared media space. In C. Meyers (Ed.), Journalism ethics: A philosophical ap-proach (pp. 117-129). New York: Oxford University Press. Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. New York: Basic Books. n

VOSContinued from Page 1

Historicizing theory

Perhaps the bigger benefit of studying how change happens is the potential for addressing the second part of the critique of social science — the status quo bias. There is emancipatory potential that comes with learning how change happens.

4 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

By LISA BURNSQUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY

At this year’s Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference at John Jay College, longtime organizer Dr. Elliot King (Loyola – Maryland) was recognized for the significant role he played in growing the popular one-day meeting. Following the luncheon keynote at this year’s conference, AJHA President Terry Lueck (Akron) presented King with a plaque honoring him for his service to AJHA and the discipline.

King has been involved with the joint meeting of the AEJMC History Division and the AJHA since its early years and spent over a decade organizing

the conference. Under his leadership, conference attendance skyrocketed from 17 people in 2000 to nearly 100 participants the past two years. What started as a small gathering of journalism historians from AEJMC and AJHA has evolved into the largest one-day meeting of media and communications historians, attracting participants from all over the world. In 2011, King handed over the reins to representatives from the AEJMC History Division and AJHA who serve a two-year term and share the program planning and site coordination duties. However, King continues play an active role, drawing on his years of experience to provide guidance for the new conference organizers. n

The 28th annual Covert Award in Mass Communication History has been won by Kathy Roberts Forde, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina.

Professor Forde won the award for “Profit and Public Interest: A Publication History of John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima,’” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 88:3 (Autumn 2011), 562-579. The piece was selected from 13 articles nominated.

The award, endowed by the late Catherine Covert, a professor of public communications at Syracuse University and former head of the AEJMC History Division, goes to the article or chapter in an edited collection that represents the year’s best essay in mass communication history.

The Covert Committee includes some long-time members, several of them Cathy’s students and colleagues, as well as the current and immediate past heads of the History Division. Committee members this year were: Terry Hynes, Nebraska at Omaha; Susan Henry, Cal State-Northridge; Elliot King, Loyola; Ann Thorne, Missouri Western; and Nancy Roberts, Chair, State University of New York at Albany.

The History Division will present the award to Professor Forde at its business meeting at the annual convention in August. n

King honored for work fostering joint conference

South Carolina’s Forde wins 28th annual Covert Award

2012 JOINT JOURNALISM HISTORY AND COMMUNICATION CONFERENCE

LISA BURNS I QUINNIPIAC

AJHA President Terry Lueck presents Elliot King with a plaque recognizing his service to the conference that brings together the AJHA and the History Division of AEJMC.

5 I SUMMER 2011 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

By ERIKA J. PRIBANIC-SMITHUNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON

Historians ranging from a high school senior to a retired college professor converged on Blacksburg, Virginia, for the AEJMC Southeast Colloquium March 8-10.

Although the History Division had only one event on the program, it packed a mighty wallop. Moderator/discussant Mike Sweeney called the division’s paper session one of the best he’s seen in any conference, anywhere at any time.

The session, titled “Press Performance in Uncertain Times,” included the following four papers:

n “Out of the Jaws of Death, Out of the Gates of Hell: A New York Tribune Reporter’s Correspondence, Captivity, and Escape During the American Civil War,” Michael Fuhlhage (Auburn)

n “American Colonists or British Subjects? The Portrayal of American Colonists in the Pennsylvania Gazette during the Stamp Act Crisis,” Cayce Myers (Georgia; Best Student Paper)

n “Instruments of Transatlantic Community: Letters from the Old World in Frederick Douglass’ Newspapers,” Sarah Parsons (North Carolina School of Science and Math) and Frank E. Fee Jr. (North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

n “Political Demagogues and Over-Zealous Partizans: Tariff of Abominations and Secession Rhetoric in the 1828 South Carolina Press,” Erika J. Pribanic-Smith (Texas-Arlington; Best Faculty Paper)

Sweeney credited the excellence of the session to “great papers, good questions and discussion from the audience, and very supportive comments all around.”

He was impressed particularly with Parsons, who presented the paper

she co-wrote with Fee as part of a mentorship program through her high school. Fee said that he had worked with Parsons a little on her presentation skills but still was blown away by how well she did.

“If there was any nervousness at all, you couldn’t tell,” Fee said. “She nailed it.”

Fuhlhage agreed that Parsons’ presentation belied her rookie status.

“Sarah showed remarkable poise for a first-time presenter of any age,” he said.

Fee said that Parsons contacted him in the spring of 2011 asking him to work with her as part of a program that connects students at her high school with faculty at North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke. He jumped at the opportunity to mentor a budding scholar and spent the fall semester giving her the same instruction on the historical method that he would give to graduate students.

Parsons carefully read all of the primary sources and analyzed them. Fee said that she has become an expert on the writings of Julia Griffiths, a British abolitionist, and that Parsons is continuing to research Griffiths’ work on her own.

Sweeney, who read the paper for his discussant role, said he never would have known that it was substantially the work of a high school student.

“Yes, Dr. Frank Fee helped shape the work, but you can't make bricks without straw,” Sweeney said. “Ms. Parsons has a bright future as an academic, if she wants it.”

Parsons said that she plans to continue her study of history at Wake Forest, where she will be a freshman in the fall. She said that before she worked with Fee, she planned to pursue journalism with a possible minor in history.

2012 AEJMC SOUTHEAST COLLOQUIUM

Teen scholar gets taste of academia

ERIKA J. PRIBANIC-SMITH I TEXAS-ARLINGTON

History: Scholars in the History Division paper session at the 2012 AEJMC Southeast Colloquium are (from the left) Sarah Parsons, Frank Fee, Erika Pribanic-Smith, Michael Fuhlhage, and Cayce Myers. The conference was hosted by Virginia Tech.

See SOUTHEAST I Page 6

6 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

“After conducting research and learning more about Dr. Fee’s work, I have decided that I enjoy studying history even more than my previous interest in journalism,” Parsons said. “History fascinates me; I love seeing connections and trends of our past.”

Parsons called her work with Fee one of the best experiences of her life and said that she learned a lot. She also said that she benefited tremendously from attending the AEJMC colloquium and talking to other scholars there.

“I was surprised to find that the range of research topics was so diverse,” Parsons said. “In our [history] division alone, although there were several projects that focused on the same time period, the topics were quite different.”

Overall, Parsons said her first conference experience was wonderful because all of the journalists and scholars she met were welcoming and passionate about their research.

Fuhlhage said that a friendly and supporting environment is the best part about an intimate conference like the colloquium.

He added that the feedback he received from Sweeney on his research was thoughtful, constructive and encouraging, and it gave him more confidence to take the next step toward publication.

In addition to moderating the history session, Sweeney discussed his own work on Italian journalist Luigi Barzini Sr. during the Russo-Japanese War in a research-in-progress session. The panel featured researchers on a diverse range of topics, both historical and otherwise.

The audience was equally receptive of all of the topics presented.

“Good scholarship is good

scholarship,” Sweeney said. “Perhaps the walls we erect around our disciplines aren't all that important.”

In total, the colloquium program included 10 research paper sessions in the history, law & policy, newspaper & online news, and open divisions; two research-in-progress sessions; a magazine division panel; and a conference-wide panel on student free press issues.

One participant on the latter panel, Paul Isom, also addressed the attendees as keynote speaker on the free press controversy that erupted following East Carolina’s decision to fire him from his student media adviser position.

Most of the conference activities took place in the Skelton Conference Center, housed in the Hokie Stone-covered Inn at Virginia Tech. On Friday evening, though, attendees made their way to an end zone suite at Virginia Tech’s Lane Stadium for a dinner of local barbecue.

There, Larry Hincker, associate vice president of University Relations, spoke on crisis communication lessons learned in the aftermath of the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings. Sweeney said Hincker’s talk was one of the things that stood out most to him about the colloquium.

“Given that the issue was being heard in court on that very day, I think it was an extraordinary gesture for VT to speak to us,” Sweeney said. “You know the university executives had to be mentally and emotionally exhausted, but they spoke to us anyway.” n

SOUTHEASTContinued from Page 1

Communication lessons from Va. Tech schooting tragedy shared at meeting

Tim VosUniversity of Missouri

Chair

Lisa M. BurnsQuinnipiac University

Vice Head and Research Chair

Kathy Roberts FordeUniversity of South Carolina

Secretary / Clio Editor

Dale CressmanBrigham Young University

PF&R Chair

Berkley HudsonUniversity of Missouri

Teaching Standards Chair

Kittrell RushingUniversity of Tennessee-Chattanooga

Webmaster

John P. FerréUniversity of Louisville

Book Awards Chair

Nancy L. RobertsUniversity of Albany-SUNY

Covert Award Chair

HISTORY DIVISION OFFICERS 2011-12

“After conducting research and learning more about Dr. Fee’s work, I have decided that I enjoy studying history even more than my previous interest in journalism.”

—Sarah Parsons North Carolina School of Science and Math

7 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

The History Division saw a jump in submissions during AEJMC’s centennial

year. There were 83 papers entered in the research competition, up from 64 last year. Of those submissions, 42 will be presented in Chicago. The 50.6 percent acceptance rate is the average across divisions. The History Division filled most of the slots acquired at the December Council

of Divisions meeting in Louisville. Two unused poster session spots were redistributed to other divisions.

Each paper was evaluated by three reviewers and chosen based on the reviewers’ feedback. The Division is grateful to the 66 volunteers who took the time to perform this valuable service. A special thank you to the following scholars who filled in for delinquent reviewers at the deadline: Jon Bekken, Kathy Bradshaw, Janet Rice McCoy, Randy Patnode, and Erika Pribanic-Smith.

This year’s submissions reflected the broad definition of media history promoted by the Division in recent years. The papers dealt with an interesting mix of topics from different historical eras and represented various theoretical and methodological perspectives.

The accepted submissions were grouped by theme into three traditional research sessions and two poster sessions. On Thursday, August 9th, a research session on “African-American Voices, Viewpoints, and Historical Perspectives on Race” is scheduled for 3:15 to 4:45 pm. A research session on “World War II Reporting” will take place on Friday, August 10 from 8:15 – 9:45 am. The

History Division’s top three faculty papers and top student paper will be presented on Friday from 3:15 – 4:45 pm. The winners will receive their awards during the Division’s business meeting, set for 6:45 p.m. Friday.

The Division’s poster sessions will be held on Saturday, August 11. This year’s Scholar-to-Scholar session, scheduled for 12:15 – 1:30 pm, will feature papers focusing on advertising and public relations history.

The bulk of the Division’s papers will be presented at the Poster Session, which runs from 3:30 - 5 p.m. Topic areas represented include magazines, politics, radio, TV, media ethics, collective memory, international reporting, sports, and women in the media.

The History Division is pleased to present such a strong line-up as part of AEJMC’s centennial celebration. We look forward to seeing many of you in Chicago this August. n

Submissions increase for centennial2012 AEJMC ANNUAL CONFERENCE

The John Hancock Center is one of the tallest buildings in Chicago and is near the Magnificent Mile neighborhood of downtown, where the conference is hosted.

Lisa M. Burns

Vice head, research chairQuinnipiac Univ.

8 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

The symposium is sponsored by the George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs, the UT-Chattanooga Department of Communication, the UT-Chattanooga Department of History, the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Fund for the Symposium, and the Walter and Leona Schmitt Family Foundation Research Fund, and because of this sponsorship, no registration fee will be charged.

The steering committee of the twentieth annual Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression solicits papers dealing with U.S. mass media of the 19th century, the Civil War in fiction and history, freedom of expression in the 19th century, presidents and the 19th century press, images of race and gender in the 19th century press, and sensationalism and crime in 19th century newspapers. Selected papers will be presented during the three-day conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, November 8-10, 2012. The top three papers and the top three student papers will be honored accordingly. Due to the generosity of the Walter and Leona Schmitt Family Foundation Research Fund, the winners of the student awards will receive $250 honoraria for delivering their papers at the conference.

The purpose of the November conference is to share current research and to develop a series of monographs. This year the steering committee will pay special attention to papers on presidents and the 19th century press and 19th century concepts of free expression. Papers from the first five conferences were published by Transaction Publishers in 2000 as a book of readings called The Civil War and the Press. More recently, Purdue University Press published papers from past conferences in three distinctly different books titled Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain (2007), Words at War: The Civil War and American Journalism (2008), and Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press (2009).

November 8-10, 2012The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

August 31, 2012

Papers should be able to be presented within 20 minutes, at least 10 to 15 pages long. Send your paper (including a 200-300 word abstract) as an MS Word e-mail attachment to West-Chair-Office@utc.edu or mail four copies of your paper and abstract to:

Dr. David SachsmanGeorge R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public AffairsDept. 3003 The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga615 McCallie Ave.Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403-2598(423) 425-4219, FAX (423) 425-2199david-sachsman@utc.eduwww.utc.edu/Academic/SymposiumOnThe19thCenturyPress/

Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression

Call for Papers

Deadline

9 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

Editor Kathy Roberts Forde

University of South Carolina

DesignMatthew J. Haught

University of South Carolina

WebmasterKittrell Rushing

University of Tenneessee-Chattanooga

Clio LogoNat Newsome

Augusta State University

Clio Among the Media is published quarterly by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Submissions to Clio are welcome. Please send them to: Kathy Roberts Forde at fordekr@sc.edu. Electronic copy by e-mail is preferred. Submissions may also be mailed to Kathy Roberts Forde, School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208.

For information, contact Forde at (803) 777-3321, or the email address above.

Recent issues of Clio may be accessed at: http://www.utc.edu/Outreach/AEJMC-HistoryDivision/histpub.html.

AMONG THE MEDIA

Ed Alwood Carol Atkinson Jim Aucoin Michael Berryhill Tamara Baldwin Maurine Beasley Jon Bekken Ron Bishop Fred Blevens Kathy Bradshaw Catherine Cassara Kathleen CollinsRoss CollinsCaryl Cooper John Coward Douglas CummingDave DaviesKate DunsmoreKate Roberts EdenborgAimee EdmondsonLillie Fears John P. Ferré

James FoustJulie A. GoldsmithKeith Greenwood Donna HalperDonna Harrington-LuekerVilja HuldenCarol Sue HumphreyBill HuntzickerCathy JacksonRichard JungerRich KaplanPaulette Kilmer Mary LamonicaGerry Lanosga Lisa LuedemanLinda LumsdenJon MarshallDiana MartinelliNicole MaurantonioJanet Rice McCoyMelissa MeadeRoger Mellen

James Mueller Lisa ParcellRandy Patnode John PaulyKristie PoehlerErika Pribanic-SmithKatrina Quinn Kyle ReinsonFelecia RossTom SchwartzKen SextonDon Shaw Stephen SiffLeonard TeelAnn ThorneBernell TrippDebbie van Tuyll Yong VolzKimberly VossDoug WardPat WashburnDale Zacher

The History Division wishes to recognize the 66 colleagues listed below for serving as reviewers for the 2012 AEJMC research paper competition. On behalf of the History Division, a sincere thank you is extended to the reviewers for performing this important service.

Reviewers for the 2012 History Division Paper Competition

The 2012 AEJMC History Division Book Award, honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2011, has been won by Peter Hartshorn, author of I Have Seen the Future: A Life of Lincoln Steffens (Counterpoint). A professor at Showa Boston Institute for Language and Culture, Hartshorn is also author of James Joyce and Trieste (Praeger, 1997).

I Have Seen the Future was chosen from a record-setting 33 entries this year by a panel of three distinguished media historians. The judges praised this biography for its compelling writing and the freshness of its perspective. They said, “We may know

much about Lincoln Steffens, but Peter Hartshorn’s prodigious research proves that there’s always more to learn and interpret about the people responsible for shaping history. I Have Seen the Future is a fine and fair-minded biography about an important, if often vaguely understood, figure in American journalism.”

Hartshorn, who will receive a plaque and a cash prize, has been invited to speak about his work during the History Division business meeting on Friday, August 10 (6:45 - 8:15 p.m.) at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference in Chicago. n

Hartshorn wins History Book Award

10 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

Thursday, August 9 8:15 – 9:45 a.m.

PF&R Panel (co-sponsored with Public Relations):

Guns, Gangsters, Prostitution, and Porn: 100 Years of Vice and Corporate Social Responsibility

Moderator: Karen Miller Russell, Georgia

Panelists: Natalie Y. Moore, Columbia College

Richard Junger, Western Michigan Bey-Ling Sha, San Diego StateJessalynn Strauss, Xavier

Thursday, August 910 – 11:30 a.m.

Teaching Panel (co-sponsored with Magazine Division):

The Century Club: Magazine History Connections for the Millennial Generation

Moderator: Sammye Johnson, Trinity Panelists: Kathleen (Kitty) Endres, AkronBerkley Hudson, MissouriCarolyn Kitch, Temple Therese Lueck, AkronBarbara Straus Reed, Rutgers

Thursday, August 9 1:30 – 3 p.m.

Research Panel (co-sponsored with Magazine Division):

The Checkered Past (and Uncertain Future) of Journalism History

Moderator: John M. Coward, Tulsa Panelists: John Pauly, MarquetteDavid Nord, IndianaDon Shaw, North Carolina at Chapel

HillCarolyn Kitch, Temple

Thursday, August 93:15 – 4:45 p.m.

Research Session: African-American Voices, Viewpoints, and Historical Perspectives on Race

Moderator: Jane Marcellus, Middle Tennessee State

Instruments of Transatlantic Community: Julia Griffiths’ “Letters from the Old World” in Frederick Douglass’ Newspapers, Sarah Parsons, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics; Frank Fee, North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Afro’s Ollie Stewart: Looking at American Politics, Society and Culture from Europe, Jinx Broussard, LSU; Newly Paul

“To End the Racial Nightmare”: James Baldwin and the Kennedys, Kathy Forde, South Carolina

Polemics and Pragmatism: James J. Kilpatrick’s Shifting Views on Race between 1963 and 1966, Elizabeth Atwood, Hood College

Discussant: Aimee Edmonson, Ohio

Thursday, August 95 – 6:30 p.m.

Teaching Panel (co-sponsored with Law & Policy Division):

Neither Fish nor Fowl? Legal History and Its Place in Research, Teaching, and AEJMC

Moderator: Derigan Silver, DenverPanelists: Kathy Roberts Forde,

South Carolina, associate editor, American Journalism

W. Wat Hopkins, Virginia Tech, editor, Communication Law and Policy

Jeffery A. Smith, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, associate editor, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Friday, August 108:15 – 9:45 a.m.

Research Session: World War II Reporting

Moderator: Kathy Bradshaw, Bowling Green

An Enemy’s Talk of Justice: Japanese Radio Propaganda against Japanese American Mass Incarceration during World War II, Takeya Mizuno, Toyo University

A New Medium at War: The Importance of Foreign Radio Reports in Portugal during World War II, Nelson Ribeiro, Catholic University of Portugal

American Wartime Newsreels and

See AEJMC I Page 11

AEJMC History Division 2012 Program

11 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

Press Reaction during WWII, Stephen McCreery, Georgia

“To plead our cause” and Make a Profit: The Competitive Environment of the African American Press during World War II, Earnest Perry, Missouri

Discussant: Mike Sweeney, Ohio

Friday, August 1011:45 a.m. – 1:15 p.m.

Teaching Panel (co-sponsored with Graduate Student Interest Group):

King Kong Class: When Size Matters and Strategies to Deal with It

Moderator: Berkley Hudson, Missouri

Panelists: Mike Sweeney, Ohio Earnest Perry, MissouriMarjorie Kruvand, Loyola Tim Macafee, Wisconsin-MadisonPatrick Ferrucci, Missouri

Friday, August 101:30 – 3 p.m.

Research Panel (co-sponsored with Critical & Cultural Studies Division):

Theorizing Journalism in TimeModerator: Carolyn Kitch, TemplePanelists: How Journalism History

Matters to Journalism Studies, John Nerone, Illinois

Inertia and Change in Journalistic Fields, Rodney Benson, New York University

Historical Mechanisms and Journalistic Change, Tim P. Vos, Missouri

Public Sphere, Imagined Community, and Popular Culture: Conceptual Frameworks for Journalism History, Michael Schudson, Columbia

Friday, August 103:15 – 4:45 p.m.

Research Session: History Division Top Papers

Moderator: Tim P. Vos, Missouri For ‘the cause of civil and religious

liberty’: Abner Cole and the Palmyra, NY, Reflector (1829-1831), Kimberley Mangun, Utah; Jeremy Chatelain, Utah *

The Evolving Bride in Godey’s Lady’s Book, Emilia Bak, Georgia **

The Struggle for Men’s Souls: Tracing Cold War Liberation Strategy in the Crusade for Freedom Campaign,

Wendy Melillo, American ***A New York Tribune Reporter’s

Correspondence, Captivity, and Escape During the American Civil War, Michael Fuhlhage, Auburn ****

Discussant: Erika Pribanic-Smith, Texas–Arlington

* Top Faculty Paper ** Top Student Paper *** Second Place Faculty Paper **** Third Place Faculty Paper

Friday, August 106:45 – 8:15 p.m.

Business Session: History Division Meeting

Presiding: Tim P. Vos, Missouri

Saturday, August 1112:15 – 1:30 p.m.

Scholar-to-Scholar Session From Crisis to Consensus:

Advertising Practitioner Responses to the Trust Consolidation Era, 1898-1902, Stewart Alter, McCann Worldgroup

Print Ads in Post-World War II Publications: An Analysis of Humor, Adam Avant, Georgia

On Finding Dorothy Shaver: First Lady of Retailing and Public Relations Innovator, Sandra Braun, Mount Royal

American OGPU: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the ‘Smear Campaign’ of 1940, Matthew Cecil, South Dakota State

Seize the Time: How the Black Panthers’ Early Media Strategies Shaped the Party’s Image, Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen, Wisconsin, Madison

Discussant: Lisa Parcell, Wichita

Saturday, August 113:30 – 5 p.m.

Poster SessionYoung Guns: How Firearms

Advertisers Targeted Children in Magazines of the Early 1900s, Marshel Rossow, Minnesota State, Mankato

Independent Woman: How a World War I Recruiting Effort Gave Rise to a Feminist Magazine, Jane Marcellus, Middle Tennessee State

The Shenandoah Crash As Seen Through the National Magazines of the 1920s, Thomas J. Hrach, Memphis

Lasting Scars of the JFK Assassination: The Tragedy and PTSD-like Trauma of Merriman Smith, Young Joon Lim, Ohio; Michael Sweeney, Ohio

‘Ask what you can do to the Army’: The Underground G.I. Press during Vietnam, Chad Painter, Missouri; Patrick Ferrucci, Missouri

“Just Plain Jimmy”: Magazine Coverage of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 Campaign, Amber Roessner, Tennessee; Natalie Manayeva, Tennessee

The Contradictions of Herbert Hoover: Positive and Negative Liberty in American Broadcasting Policy, Seth Ashley, Boise State

Raised on the Radio: The 1920s and America’s First Media Generation, Annie Sugar, Colorado-Boulder

RCAism: The Roots of a Rationalized Broadcasting System, Randall Patnode, Xavier

Bringing Politics to the Living Room: The Kefauver Hearing and the Debate on the Democratic Potential of a New Medium, Bastiaan Vanacker, Loyola-Chicago

An Uneasy Encounter: Global Perspectives and American Journalism Ideals on Town Meeting of the World, Kevin Grieves, Ohio

Congress Needs Help: The Story of NBC’s Extraordinary 1965 Documentary Critique of Legislative Inefficiency, Thomas Mascaro, Bowling Green

AEJMCContinued from Page 10

See AEJMC I Page 12

12 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

“Not Exactly Lying”: The Life and Death of the “Fake” in Journalism and Photography, 1880-1910, Andie Tucher, Columbia

“A Strange Absence of News”: The Titanic, The Times, Checkbook Journalism, and the Inquiry Into the Public’s Right to Know, Ronald Rodgers, Florida

When a Doctor Became a Whistleblower: Dr. Henry K. Beecher and the Press, 1965-1966, Amy Snow Landa, Minnesota

Media, Memory, and a Sense of Place: The Nation’s First Washington, Janice Hume, Georgia

Tributes to Fallen Journalists: The Role of the Hero Myth in Journalistic Practice, Raymond McCaffrey **

Literary Journalism “tinctured with magic”: The Subjectivity of William Bolitho, Brandon Bouchillon, Texas Tech; Kevin Stoker, Texas Tech

Out of the Mists of Time: Newspaper Coverage of Travel to Lithuania 1988-1993, Kerry Kubilius, Ohio

“A Slogan of Mockery”: Never Again and the Unnamed Genocide in Southern Sudan, 1989-2005, Sally Ann Cruikshank, Ohio

Free at Last: Media Framing and the Evolution of Free Agency in Major League Baseball, Brett Borton, South Carolina *

On the Front Page in the ‘Jazz Age’ in Chicago: Ione Quinby, ‘Girl Reporter’, Stephen Byers, Marquette; Genevieve G. McBride, Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Mary Garber: A Woman in a Man’s World, Ashley Furrow, Ohio

Awarding a Revolution: The Penney-Missouri Magazine Awards During Second-Wave Feminism, Dayne Logan, Missouri

Framing of Women Pharmacists in Mainstream and Trade Press During Second-Wave Feminism, L. Michael Posey, Georgia

Discussants: Keith Greenwood, Tom Schwartz, Jim Foust, Roger Mellen, Jon

Bekken, Lisa Luedeman, Yong Volz, Maurine Beasley

* Second Place Student Paper ** Third Place Student Paper

Saturday, August 115:15 – 6:45 p.m.

PF&R Panel (co-sponsored with Critical & Cultural Studies Division):

Whose Revolution? Gramsci, History, and the Power of Media in the 21st Century

Moderator: Charles Self, OklahomaPanelists: On the Relevance of

Gramsci to 21st Century Critical/Cultural Media Studies, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Iowa

Cultural Hegemony and the Audience in the Age of Social Media: Produsage vs. Templatation, Shayla Thiel-Stern, Minnesota

Gender Dynamics and Journalists: Cultural Work and the Function of Functionaries, Erika Engstrom, Nevada-Las Vegas

Learning Without Illusions and Without Becoming Disillusioned: Gramsci, Media, and Liquid Literacy, Ralph Beliveau, Oklahoma

Saturday, August 117 p.m. - ???

Pub Crawl with Critical & Cultural Studies Division

Sunday, August 1210 – 11:30 a.m.

PF&R Panel (co-sponsored with Law & Policy and Council of Affiliates):

Prejudging Justice: The News Media and Prominent Criminal Trials, 1897 to 2011

Moderator: Wendy Melillo, American

Panelists: Andrea Lyon, former defense attorney for Casey Anthony

W. Joseph Campbell, American Rummana Hussain, criminal courts

reporter, Chicago Sun-Times John C. Watson, American n

AEJMCContinued from Page 11 Important Information: The Chicago Program

If you’re new to AEJMC the method for establishing the program for the annual conference might be a mystery to you. Truth be told, it’s something of a mystery even to long-timers in the organization. Suffice it to say that each division’s slots in the program – papers, posters, invited panels, business meetings, and the like – are deter-mined in what AEJMC has called the “chip auction.” It’s actually more like a giant game of poker with close to 30 players around the table.

As has frequently happened in the last several years, in 2011-12 a new player was added to the poker game. Political Communication is a new interest group and is programming slots for the 2012 conference. That means more competition for programming slots. Here’s what that means for the History Division this year: we were able to program one less slot than last year, we were not able to get a high density session (where 8 – 10 papers are presented), and our business meeting will not immediately follow our top paper panel, as it has in the past.

Nevertheless, the History Division has been able to co-sponsor 8 panels at the Chicago Conference. Of the 14 panel proposals sub-mitted to the History Division, we were able to find co-sponsors for 5 of them. We agreed to co-sponsor 3 others. The schedule is a nice mix of teaching, PF&R, and invited research panels. Check out the full program schedule for details.

13 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 Pages 3-4, 5-7, 27, and 24-25.Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

This book focuses on the relationship between newspapers and radio—the old media and the new—during the period stretching from the origins of radio broadcasting through the early years of commercial television, roughly 1920 to 1953. In so doing, it makes two related arguments. First, it argues that newspapers used radio broadcasting to create a new kind of media corporation that utilized multiple media to circulate information and generate profits. And second, it argues that these multimedia corporations were central to the legal and political processes structuring the American public sphere in the twentieth century. These corporations participated in virtually every significant media policy debate, and they were strongly influential on the outcomes. Ultimately, these were the corporations that made the business of information a multimedia endeavor, and their actions transformed the ways that Americans received ideas about culture, society, and politics in the twentieth century.

Radio was in many respects transformative in the ways that it expanded the public sphere and enabled new ways of imagining the world through sound. Through radio, ideas circulated in the United States with more variety and with greater immediacy. After 1920, American homes became filled with the sounds of news, speeches, music, and church services, all broadcast live from what were to listeners unseen and often distant sites. Though it was compelling

for many to have new experiences of the world through listening, however, it is important to remember that radio did not simply or seamlessly displace the long-standing practice of apprehending the world through print. A nation of radio listeners remained as well a nation of readers, and as they added radio sets to their homes in vast numbers in the 1920s and 1930s, Americans never stopped reading newspapers. In fact, they read more. Between 1920 and 1955, daily newspaper circulation nearly doubled, a rate that well outpaced a concurrently dramatic population growth, and the newspaper remained a major part of daily life in the era of electronic broadcasting. 1

…Though newspapers owned a small

portion of the total stations on the air in the 1920s (an average of about 7 percent for the years 1923–1929),

these stations were among the most powerful and significant of any across the country, and their influence on the industry structure and public policy for radio vastly outpaced their numbers. The number of newspaper-owned stations rose steadily after 1929, and by 1937 newspapers owned 25 percent of American radio stations. By 1940, newspapers owned almost a third of the stations broadcasting in the United States, and this trend continued into newly licensed FM stations after 1941 and television stations after 1948. Across eras, newspapers played strong roles at formative moments in broadcasting, and over time their activities in broadcasting created a nationwide phenomenon that shaped the media in towns and cities of all sizes. As one author noted in the magazine Radio Broadcast in 1925, the “future of the press lies in the air,” and the multimedia business model developed by newspapers became the dominant one for American media corporations in the twentieth century. In the decades when the basic corporate and legal structures of American broadcasting were being constituted and entrenched, to use sociologist Paul Starr’s terms, newspapers were among the most significant institutional actors. Through radio, newspaper corporations participated in the institutional transformation of the mass media as they began creating new media corporations whose products were not just printed sheets, but instead branded information communicated through multiple media from a single corporate source.2

…

Sound Business:Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New MediaMichael Stamm I Michigan State University

See STAMM I Page 14

Ultimately, the history of newspaper involvement in broadcasting is a history of the transformation of the institutions that defined the public sphere in the United States in the transitional period between the era in which printed materials were the dominant media of mass communication and the evolution of our own electronically mediated environment. Though the public sphere changed dramatically after the introduction of radio broadcasting, this is a complex story of adaptation rather than a simple story of decline. In his classic formulation of the public sphere concept, Jürgen Habermas presented radio as part of a constellation of new twentieth-century media that transformed an active “rational-critical” reading public into a passive collection of spectators, a process that created an inferior public culture and provided a weak foundation for informed political participation. “The world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only,” Habermas argued, drawing a stark contrast between a public culture mediated through print and one created through the electronic media. When one examines the roles played by newspapers as institutions in shaping the new public sphere created by radio broadcasting, this clear distinction between eras and media seems less tenable. In many cases, the corporations that shaped the print-based public sphere remained the institutions shaping the public sphere that included broadcasting.3

This is a history with a mixed legacy. It is on the one hand a story of media consolidation with origins in the early days of radio broadcasting. On the other hand, it is also a story of strategic behavior by newspapers as business firms legitimately believing that they were uniquely qualified to be good broadcasters. One of the main goals of this book is to provide an account of

media history that neither celebrates nor condemns corporate broadcasting, but instead one that demonstrates how newspapers were key institutional actors in shaping the history of American broadcasting.4

…The kind of public culture that

emerged after the introduction of radio broadcasting had a great deal to do with the activities of these new multimedia corporations that newspaper publishers began to develop in the 1920s. This corporate transformation did not take place in a political vacuum, as in government and among ordinary citizens these new corporations seemed to be not manifestations of strategic decisions by firms in the media business but instead institutions that could potentially do serious harm to American society and politics by gaining too much power to shape public discourse and public opinion. Competing understandings of these corporations shaped the path of their development and in turn the contours of American life in an age of commercial multimedia.

…One of this book’s central concerns

is with the evolution of the discourse about a “marketplace of ideas” as it was shaped by the structures of advanced industrial capitalism, the administrative state, and the emerging new media system that was embedded within both. At the policy level, FCC chairman James Lawrence Fly tried to apply some of these ideas into media ownership regulations in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In a 1944 speech, Fly argued that the American newspaper business had become increasingly consolidated and that many papers had been “absorbed by national chains.” Nationally, control of the press was slipping into fewer hands, and radio was similarly concentrated, as it had been taken over by newspapers to the degree that a “third of the radio stations are owned by the varied press interests. Most of these are closely affiliated with the national networks.” What Fly

worked for on the FCC was the kind of diverse marketplace of ideas that [prominent media attorney] Morris Ernst advocated, and his methods were inspired by the conception of positive state power that [John] Dewey and [Louis] Brandeis suggested. “We live in an age of machines, mass production, and high-pressure merchandizing, monopolies and near-monopolies,” Fly argued. “The present-day threat—the increasing domination of the media of communication by a few economic entities, and the resultant lessening of opportunities for the full, free spread of all kinds and shades of opinion—is the begotten child of technology and big business.” While quoting Holmes’s Abrams decision in his speech, Fly argued that “we must cling to the theory that ideas, good and bad, must have access to the market-place of thought, clashing in open competition in the bid for popular acceptance.” Democracy, Fly concluded, was “most faithfully served by diversity.”5

This marketplace of ideas metaphor is far from perfect in its application to media policy, and some economists and legal scholars argue that its defects have prevented the FCC from creating either consistent or judicially sustainable regulations on media ownership.6 This book is not an attempt to demonstrate the metaphor’s unqualified virtue. Rather, it aims to show how central the idea was to thinking about the relationship between press, radio, and democracy at a particularly significant and transformative historical moment. Less than a year after Oliver Wendell Holmes had [in his dissenting opinion in Abrams v. U.S.] made the “free trade in ideas . . . in the competition of the market” the ideal standard for a society wanting free expression and democracy, this was the language that the Detroit News used to describe its first broadcast [over WWJ, the pioneering station that it owned] in August 1920: an “invisible trumpet to the unseen crowds in the

14 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

See STAMM I Page 15

STAMMContinued from Page 13

unseen marketplace.”7As the federal government tried to

develop policies designed to protect diversity of ownership at the local and national levels, Brandeisian and Deweyan proponents of a competitive “marketplace of ideas” kept the concept at the center of virtually all of the debates. At times, these debates can seem arcane and mundane, as regulators and industry representatives have argued endlessly over such issues as the exact number of FM, AM, or television stations a particular corporation may own at the local and national levels and whether a newspaper should be permitted to own a broadcasting station in the same city in which it publishes.8 Ultimately, however, the substance of the debates about media ownership is grounded deeply in American ideals about politics and society. As legal scholar C. Edwin Baker notes, these debates in fact “reflect competing ideals of democracy and the value placed on them,” and they have determined the basic structures of the industries creating the ideal “informed citizen” at the heart of our conception of a free society. In interwar America, the debate over newspaper ownership of radio was ultimately over who would have the power to shape public opinion and the emerging new public sphere that included radio alongside newspapers, and who would have the power to create the institutions undergirding American society and politics.9

For more information about Sound Business by Michael Stamm, see http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14882.html.

Footnotes1 Between 1920 and 1955, the

American population rose from 106.5 million to 165.3 million, a 55 percent increase, while daily newspaper circulation rose from 27.8 million to 56.1 million, a 102 percent increase. See

U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), 9, 809; and Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway, “A Framework for the History of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940,” in Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. 4, Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 7-21.

2 James Young, “Is the Radio Newspaper Next?” Radio Broadcast 7 (September 1925): 575; Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

3 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000 [1962]), 51, 170–71.

4 Michael Schudson, “Toward a Troubleshooting Manual for Journalism History,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (Autumn 1997): 463-76; David Paul Nord, “A Plea for Journalism History,” Journalism History 15 (Spring 1988): 8-15.

5 James Lawrence Fly, “Freedom of Speech and the Press,” Talk at Cornell University, 20 September 1944, 3, 5-7, emphasis in original, Box 39,

Folder Cornell University—Public Lecture—9-20-44, James Lawrence Fly Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York, NY; Mickie Edwardson, “James Lawrence Fly’s Fight for a Free Marketplace of Ideas,” American Journalism 14 (Winter 1997): 19-39.

6 Adam Candeub, “Media Ownership Regulation, the First Amendment, and Democracy’s Future,” University of California Davis Law Review 41 (April 2008): 1547-1612; Philip Napoli, “Deconstructing the Diversity Principle,” Journal of Communication 49 (Autumn 1999): 7-34; Robert Entman and Steven Wildman, “Reconciling Economic and Non-Economic Perspectives on Media Policy: Transcending the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’,” Journal of Communication 42 (Winter 1992): 5-19.

7 Abrams v. U.S., 630; Detroit News, 1 September 1920, quoted in Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Vol. 1, to 1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 63.

8 The specific parameters of this regulation have changed dramatically from the early days of radio to the present. For an excellent summary of media ownership laws, see Candeub, “Media Ownership Regulation,” 1555-61.

9 C. Edwin Baker, Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48. n

15 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

At times, these debates can seem arcane and mundane, as regulators and industry representatives have argued endlessly over such issues as the exact number of FM, AM, or television stations a particular corporation may own at the local and national levels and whether a newspaper should be permitted to own a broadcasting station in the same city in which it publishes. Ultimately, however, the substance of the debates about media ownership is grounded deeply in American ideals about politics and society.

STAMMContinued from Page 11

The jack-of-all-trades writer Carl Sandburg famously and poetically described his beloved Chicago this way:

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders

As we gather this summer for our annual convention in Chicago, one History Division session will focus on classrooms with “husky, brawling…big shoulders”—and how best to manage that for everyone’s benefit.

We will convene for that panel on Friday, August 10, from 11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. The History Division and the Graduate Student Interest Group will serve as co-hosts.

So, with appreciation for and in the spirit of Sandburg, we will address those who would cry out about bigness. We will respond to those who would quote Sandburg and say of these classes with 50, 100, 250, and, yea, even with 500 students in a cavernous auditorium:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them…

And they tell me you are crooked…And they tell me you are brutal…

As a faculty member or as teaching assistants, the panelists have taught large classes or will teach one, and will offer strategies to deal with the wicked, the

crooked and the brutal.To that end, we will consider

suggestions such as these made by panelist Mike Sweeney, associate professor at Ohio University:

n Play to your character strengths. Being a teacher, especially in front of a large class, is like being an actor on stage. When you are comfortable, your students will recognize that. For example, be funny — if you are a funny person.

n Break up the two-hour class into two sections, with a five- to ten-minute break in between. If you show a video, show 15 minutes or so, break, talk a bit, and then show more. Don’t ever show an hour-long video without stopping, or you will turn on the lights to find half your class asleep.

Panelist Patrick Ferrucci, a doctoral teaching assistant at University of Missouri, offers a different take on videos:

n Use many short (no more than two minutes) videos to break up a lecture to a large class.

From a certain viewpoint, say a departmental budget one, perhaps large classes provide a beneficial economy of scale. But as we think about whether a class could be too big to be effective educationally, we will pursue a provocative notion from panelist Marjorie Kruvand, an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago:

n Might a class be too small?I will moderate the panel, and it

likely will be a bit less formal than some. I would delight in getting panelists to address your problems and solutions with giant classes.

We will welcome telling anecdotes about huge classes when things went awry and when they went swimmingly. And I will re-tell the story about

the time I threw a tennis ball into a classroom with 500 students and hit one student in the head when she did not adhere to my admonition for everyone to close their laptops and look up—because I was going to be tossing some tennis balls for them to catch.

On another occasion, during football season, I brought a spongy football to an auditorium-sized journalism class that included first-string players from the Mizzou football team. I did not dare throw it to the starting quarterback, James Franklin, to single him out. But I did throw it to one of his teammates who easily caught it and then threw the ball way across the auditorium to a friend.

Why all the tossing of balls? I use them as a kind of “ice-breaker” that Mike Sweeney will discuss. When the students catch the ball, I have them introduce themselves, say where they are from and then have them introduce the seatmates on either side. Remarkably, sometimes they do not even know the person sitting next to them. After that, I ask them to throw the ball to someone else that they may know or not know.

In Chicago, I may even bring some balls for us to toss around for practice, too. Regardless, we’ll all learn from one another about what works and what does not work in the classes with big shoulders. And maybe then, in the spirit of Sandburg, we will be so delighted by what we have learned that we will be

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter…

Please direct ideas, comments and questions to HudsonB@missouri.edu. This is Hudson’s last column as Teaching Standards Chair, a position he relinquishes in August at the close of a two-year term. n

16 I SUMMER 2012 CLIO: AMONG THE MEDIA

The King Kong class: When size matters and strategies to deal with it

Berkley Hudson

Teaching ChairUniv. of Missouri

TEACHING STANDARDS